“Leaky gut”. The basic idea is that your gut can be punctured, which then impacts how well you digest your food, absorb nutrients, how sensitive you are to possible allergens, and how much inflammation food may cause you.
Today, you’re going learn a little bit about how to prevent the next level of leaky gut, leaky brain!
No, we're not preparing for the zombie apocalypse just yet, gray matter will not be oozing out of your ears. The reality is much easier than this. The fact is, your brain is actually similar to your gut in this respect:
Just like your gastrointestinal (GI) tract has a protective barrier protecting it from its surroundings, your brain also has its own barrier that protects it from your body and bloodstream. You may have heard of the blood-brain barrier (BBB). And, just like you can get a leaky gut, you can also develop a leaky brain.
Think of your last hangover? You’ve no doubt experienced the effects of something called acetaldehyde, the byproduct of your body breaking down alcohol. Here's a little bot you may have not known. Acetaldehyde is also used in the manufacturing of adhesives and plastics, acetaldehyde is approximately 30 times more toxic than alcohol. It’s also a close chemical cousin of formaldehyde (embalming fluid), and is a forceful neurotoxin that crosses the blood-brain barrier and causes, that ever so non-pleasant feeling, the hangover.
You may have heard of leaky gut in terms of “intestinal permeability”, which might make it seem like your gut shouldn’t be so permeable. But the truth is that your gut is naturally and selectively permeable, allowing helpful compounds like nutrients to pass into the body while keeping harmful toxins and pathogens out. When this process fails, and the membrane of your GI tract becomes more permeable than it should be, it’s called leaky gut.
Leaky brain issues are just as common because your blood-brain barrier is also semi-permeable. Your brain needs things like glucose, amino acids, fat-soluble nutrients, and ketones to function properly, and gets them through the semi-permeable blood vessels that shuttle them into your noggin. Your brain also needs the BBB to keep harmful toxins, infectious pathogens, and errant immune cells out. But sometimes, toxins still manage to get through, like acetaldehyde. When the barrier is compromised, the floodgates open to all manner of nasty intruders, which can help to increase brain fog, depression, anxiety, and a host of neurodegenerative diseases, like dementia, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s.
Basically, when the blood-brain barrier is punctured, ruptured, or loosened, things like heavy metals, toxins, molds, fungi, and chemicals produced by our post-industrial world seep in and wreak havoc. This article, will dig into the mechanics behind the BBB, what can damage it, and then how to repair and maintain it.
What Is the Blood-Brain Barrier?
Let's drop THE SCIENCE, the blood-brain barrier, at its most basic and well-recognized level, is formed by brain capillary endothelial cells (simple squamous (flat) cells that line the inside walls of blood and lymphatic vessels). It includes anatomical, physicochemical, and biochemical mechanisms that control the exchange of materials between blood, brain, and cerebrospinal fluid, which makes it the main physical barrier through which nutrients, hormones, and various chemicals pass from your brain to your blood system, and vice versa. Caffeine, for example, crosses the barrier like a child with a crosswalk attendant (easily), and, as you’ll learn, is actually potently beneficial for it.
The barrier maintains the extracellular environment of the central nervous system and brain through three main lines of defense:
The physical barrier itself between blood and brain,
Transporters that mediate the flow of compounds from the brain to the blood, and,
An enzymatic barrier that contains neurotransmitters and toxin metabolizing enzymes in the endothelial and epithelial cells of the brain and blood, respectively.
Most of the science on the BBB in the 20th and 21st centuries has mostly focused on the first layer, the physical barrier, usually in order to learn how to deliver drugs more effectively to the central nervous system. This is the part of the BBB we’re going to cover here.
Now, to understand the fragility of this physical barrier, you have to understand that the endothelial cells lining blood vessels are only one layer thick. Some of the largest vessels, the arteries and the veins, are also surrounded by thick walls of connective tissue and layers upon layers of smooth muscle cells; but the vessel walls themselves are lined by a thin, single sheet of cells. This ultra-thin sheet determines the passage of every substance from the blood to the rest of the body — including the brain. So when it gets damaged, things can get rough, quickly.
Like every other cell type in your body, endothelial cells can divide and repair damages in the sheet wall of a given blood vessel. If left to themselves, they’ll live out a cell lifetime that ranges from a couple of months (liver endothelium) to several years (brain endothelium). But when they’re exposed to detrimental compounds and physiological circumstances (which we’ll go over in a moment), they can die prematurely and will need to divide quickly to repair the vessel wall. And when the vessel wall is exposed to this state without break, the BBB will be weakened overall, which can lead to all kinds of issues, including the leakage of plasma proteins into certain regions of the brain. This can cause buildup of inflammation in the brain, and long-term, chronic inflammation only causes problems.
So the inevitable question is: What weakens the blood-brain-barrier?
One cause that's rampant these days is sleep-deprivation. Your body needs to sleep to enjoy appropriate amounts of each sleep phase, in order to properly regulate the functions and integrity of the BBB. In particular, loss of REM (rapid eye movement) sleep damages much of this function. If you’re sleeping less than, in most cases, the recommended seven to nine hours per 24 hours, your brain suffers and is more susceptible to invasion.
Another cause that was already mentioned is excessive alcohol intake. Studies indicate that long-term alcohol abuse can lead to massive functional and morphological changes in the CNS, including neurodegeneration that ranges from minor to full-on cell death. This occurs through oxidative stress on neural cells. The alcohol you drink is essentially ethanol (EtOH), which, among making you think you can dance, enhances reactive oxygen species (ROS) that damage brain cells. Chronic exposure to alcohol also increases the expression of CYPE1, the enzyme that turns EtOH into ROS and… acetaldehyde. And, both EtOH and its metabolite acetaldehyde decrease the tightness of the BBB, which is exactly what you don't want.
Another cause is ever-demonized high-blood pressure. One study observed rats and found that the BBB dysfunction present in the rats was quite clearly related to the combined effects of elevated blood pressure and cerebral vasodilation (the widening of blood vessels in the brain). And, unfortunately for all of us, high blood pressure is caused by a number of things, including stress (from anywhere), poor breathing, poor diet, lack of sleep, and more. Considering one in every three adults in the U.S. has high blood pressure, this is serious.
With all these threats offending your brain and vascular system, how can you prevent leakage into your blood-brain barrier?
How To Fix A Leaky Blood-Brain-Barrier
Fortunately, there's plenty of measures you can take to prevent brain leakage, fill in holes that may already be there, and keep your endothelium tight. Here are eleven ways to restore a leaky brain.
1) Sleep: Before you do anything else, get in on more sleep. The permeability of the BBB was restored to baseline after just 24 hours of recovery sleep. Sleep loss impairs the immune system, while simultaneously increasing levels of pro-inflammatory mediators. It also increases sympathetic nervous system activity and causes endothelial dysfunction. To maintain homeostasis, the general health of your body, and the health of your BBB in particular, get between 7 and 9 hours of sleep per 24 hour period. And, if you want to take things a step further, small supplemented amounts of the sleep hormone melatonin can undo increases in BBB permeability and maintain its integrity.
2) Limit Alcohol: As you learned above, this one is a biggie. While Sweat Nation encourages a glass of wine from time to time, drinking low levels of alcohol can cause low doses of ethanol to migrate across the barrier and trigger good endorphins and relaxing neurotransmitter receptors, higher amounts on the other hand, cause high-doses of ethanol, along with acetaldehyde that damage brain neurons. So keep it classy with one, maybe two glasses of wine.
3) Control Blood Pressure: Both acute and chronic hypertension increase blood-brain barrier permeability. Dark chocolate, high-dose garlic, magnesium, potassium, and even hand-grip training can all help to lower blood pressure. And luckily, you don’t have to eat an entire bowl of elephant garlic to reap the benefits. There’s a form of garlic extract called allicin, which is the main active component of garlic, that’s a far more efficient way to get the brain-boosting benefits of this common ingredient. As far as grip devices go, you can take a hand-grip strengthener with you in the car or airplane or train, and just keep squeezing it.
4) High-Fat Diets: Rodents that were given a 40% saturated fat diet (from cocoa butter) experienced elevated blood-brain barrier permeability, but adding in either aged garlic extract, alpha-lipoic acid (ALA), niacin, or nicotinamide completely eliminated this elevation. Phytonutrient-rich plants and spices such as curcumin (from turmeric), astragalus root, cruciferous veggies like broccoli, brussels sprouts, and cabbage produce a similar healing effect. Fiber-rich plants are also beneficial. They allow you to consume high amounts of fat while minimizing some of its effects. Make sure you also start including lots of dark, leafy greens in your meals, like kale, spinach, or collard greens.
5) Drink Coffee and/or Tea: Caffeine is a noted protector of blood-brain barrier integrity, and may even help inhibit BBB disruption as a means of preventing Alzheimer’s disease.
6) Supplementation: Alpha-GPC, a type of choline that readily crosses the blood-brain barrier, is known to improve endothelial dysfunction. Inositol from egg yolks improves BBB integrity, berberine reduces its permeability and increases resistance to brain damage following head trauma, and vitamins B12, 6, and 9 restore it to equilibrium.
7) Magnesium: As mentioned, high magnesium intake can constrict BBB permeability, even in test subjects who have been injected with an agent to induce leaky blood-brain barriers. You can get it into your system by taking it orally, or applying it topically either as a lotion or spray on the back of your neck and head.
8) Stimulate Your Vagus Nerve: Stimulating the vagus nerve with practices like singing, chanting, meditating, deep breathing, cold showers and even electronic stimulation, and a host of other lifestyle practices and biohacks can all decrease BBB permeability.
9) Limit Snacking: Ghrelin, a hunger-stimulating hormone that tells you it’s time to eat, can also improve BBB integrity. Specifically, it can reduce BBB breakdown after traumatic head injury. By avoiding frequent snacking and grazing, practicing intermittent fasting, and reaching to point of hunger, you get better BBB function.
10) Nourish Your Gut: One study observed the effects of a transplant of gut microbiota from healthy mice with perfect BBB integrity to unhealthy mice with a leaky barrier, and found that it did, in fact, restore the integrity of the damaged barriers. Luckily, you don’t have to get such transplants from other people — you can get the same results by eating more prebiotic fiber, taking quality probiotics, and eating fermented foods on a regular basis.
11) Cryotherapy: The final tip is simply… cold showers. This will affect everything from your appetite to your vagus nerve connection between the gut and brain, to temperature fluctuations that will cause a release of blood and nitric oxide in your brain, all of which will improve BBB integrity by overall suppressing mechanisms of BBB degeneration. Cold soaks, cold shower, splashing cold water on your face, it’s that simple.
Take-Aways
It’s unlikely that you’d ever want to associate the word “leaky” with any part of your body. But the fact is that if you don’t take care of yourself, leak they will.
If you’ve never heard of the blood-brain barrier before this, don’t worry if you think that you’ve done irreparable damage to it. As mentioned, your body which of course includes your endothelial cells is amazing as they regenerate fairly quickly. All you have to do is give yourself the proper nutrition, sleep, and environments. If you’re a regular drinker, learn to be satisfied with just one or two drinks. If you tend to stay up late, read up on how to fall asleep faster, and stay asleep. If you have a history of high blood pressure, look into some treatments, and start working your hand grip.
Over time you can implement more and more of these strategies. But for now, the final takeaway is this: cold showers address the health of the vagus nerve, appetite, blood pressure, sleep, and even burn fat. This week, your task is to take a 2 to 5 minute cold shower each day or splash some cold water on your face 10 to 20 times a day. If you start creating these habits, eventually you won’t even have to think about your blood-brain barrier to give it the TLC it needs.
To your wealth and health.
Track Of The Day - Mar - Bomba Estereo
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